The sale of breakfast cereals is a highly competitive business. In addition to the particular food components, color, flavor, texture, bowl life and increasingly shapes or other appearance features are important in the marketability of any particular breakfast cereal. For example, pillow-shaped pieces are a shape which is believed to have particular market appeal, with the pieces either being formed of a single homogeneous material or multiple materials such as a coextrudate including an outer shell of a first material such as a cereal material and an inner phase of a second, filling material such as an icing or fruit paste.
One method of forming such pillow-shaped pieces or biscuits is to crimp a rope of dough material at spaced intervals, with the pieces either being individually cut to be independent from each other or with the pieces being cut to remain in continuous ropes with easily fracturable connections. Cooker/extruders are capable of producing dough ropes at relatively high rates of speed in the order of 350 feet (100 meters) per minute, and in fact the uniformity and consistency of the dough ropes increases at high rates of production. The pieces can be produced by passing the dough ropes between counter rotating crimping/cutting rollers, with at least one of the rollers including blades which crimp/cut the rope to the desired longitudinal length of pieces. The cooked cereal dough can be puffed or unpuffed as desired. Other variations include fillings of various types such as fruit pastes, gels or icings for RTE cereals or cheeses for grain based snack products.
In one known variation, the exterior surfaces are gabricated from multiple layers of shredded cooked cereals formed with a mat or web.
The present invention is an improvement in such RTE cereals. More particularly, the present invention provides an improvement to extruded cooked cereal dough ropes formed into individual pieces. The present invention provides cooked cereal dough ropes in the form of multiple thin strands twisted and formed into a braided rope pattern.
The present invention provides twisted multistrand rope products, and new methods for their preparation, that are novel and thus possess great consumer appeal. In addition to their novelty appeal, surprisingly, the roped RTE cereal products also exhibit unexpected and beneficial texture and bowl life properties. The twisted multistrand rope RTE cereal products exhibit improved textures and increased bowl life compared to identical formulations fabricated into conventional shapes such as puffed spheres, filament shreds or flakes.
In particular, bran based RTE cereals in twisted multistrand rope form exhibit especially surprising bowl life. This result is unexpected because when such bran RTE cereals are fabricated into RTE cereals of other shapes, e.g., flakes, these other products tend to get soft in milk immediately. Also, the usual grittiness and dark colors associated with high fiber cereals are not present with the RTE cereal products of the present invention.